Gulliver’s Travels as a Travelogue/ Travel Narrative
Travel writing was one of the popular literary genres of the eighteenth century. The
numerous scientific explorations during this period were motivated by the ambition to venture
into unknown territories. In ‘Idler No.97’, Samuel Johnson had diagnosed a natural curiosity
“to learn the sentiments, manners and condition of the rest” among the people of his age. In
Gulliver’s Travels Swift overlays satire and parody upon the frame of travel-writing as he
intends to document Gulliver’s journeys as a weapon of his satire on the politics and society of
his time.
By mocking the travel narratives of his time, Swift presents his book as a social and
political commentary before his readers who read travelogues as factual documents despite the
overt Royalist paraphernalia and overly descriptive aspects. Gulliver’s travel takes him to the
flying island of Laputa, inhabited by philosophers in Book-III called, ‘A Voyage to Laputa’, In
Laputa power is exercised not through physical size but through technology. The government
floats over the rest of the kingdom, using technology to control its subjects. The floating island
represents the distance between the government and the people it governs. The king is oblivious
to the real concerns of the people below. The academy serves to create entirely useless projects
while the people stare outside its walls. Here men are engaged in strange scientific and
philosophical speculations and experiments like as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers,
softening marble for use in pillows, and he was uncovering political conspiracies by examining
the excrement of suspicious persons:
“He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers,
which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in
raw inclement summers.”
Book-IV of Gulliver’s Travels contains some of the most corrosive and offensive satire
on mankind. In this part, ‘A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’, the Yahoos are the
representative of human nature. In the fourth part Gulliver’s Travels, disgust for human is
expressed to such an extreme that readers often feel uncomfortable reading this section. Swift
deflates humankind very straightforwardly by portraying the Yahoos humanlike and
associating humankind with Yahoos.
An important aspect of the travel narrative satirized by Swift is its function as a form
of reflection on contemporary European society. Travelogue's observations about new nations
and experiences could be used to interrogate domestic culture and mores, not always to their
advantage. And this aspect of the growing interest in the new world that wasn't just confined
to travel-writing. By championing the Houyhnhnms over the human-like Yahoos in Book-IV,
Swift thus targets his satire on the English as well as on the entire mankind. Gulliver’s
preference for the civilized world of the Hounymnyms in the Book-IV, represents this
contemporary vogue taken to an extreme: by the end of the fourth book, Gulliver returns to
England and can only tolerate the company of horses, and he stuffs his nose with lavender and
rue to cut out the smell of mankind.
Under the garb of a travelogue and a parody of the then popular travel narrative,
Gulliver’s Travels combines Swift’s adventure with savage satire, mocking English customs
and the politics of the day. Swift’s book is a satirical commentary on his own society’s
fascination with travel and exploration – riffing, in particular, on the pious optimism of Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which had been published seven years earlier – but it also
fantastically magnifies, diminishes, twists and inverts many ‘ordinary’ features of human life,
in ways that are ultimately hilarious, scathing and remarkably humane.
